Doing Time

Writing Workshops in prison

Carole Glasser Langille

• Publisher: Pottersfield Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781988286921
• eBook ISBN: 9781988286938
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Poetry can address our most intimate, frightened, hopeful selves. Langille found this to be true as she introduced poems to men and women in prison and gave writing assignments based on the discussions these poems inspired. Over and over participants shared private moments of self-awareness. The support they gave each other and the stories they told were profound. This book puts to rest many of the myths we have about inmates. It confirms both that people cannot be reduced to their worst deeds and that creative expression has a central place in the process of rehabilitation. Most pointedly, Langille's work reveals how, by failing the men and women behind bars, the prison system harms us all.

Participants in these workshops were complicated people. As Bryan Stevenson, an attorney who fights for the wrongfully accused on death row, says, "People are more than the worst thing we've ever done... Even if you kill someone, you're not just a killer." Doing Time makes us rethink the myths we have about inmates and gives us insights into the force of trauma and the power of dignity. We get a glimpse of what goes on in a prison system and we learn, as Langille learned, from the men and women she worked with.

CHAPTER ONE

A few years after I moved to a rural community near Hubbards, about sixty kilometres from Lunenburg and about forty-five minutes from the Central Nova Scotia Correctional Facility, I wrote to the John Howard Society, outlining a writing workshop I proposed to give. I had an interview with the director of the society in the beginning of 2014 and he arranged a meeting with a committee in charge of programming at the prison. The director came to the meeting as well.

I explained how I planned to give the workshops and why I wanted to give them. Creativity is a life force, I said. I wanted to inspire inmates to write about what mattered to them. Writing clarifies thoughts, I said, and when thinking is clearer, actions become more comprehensible.

Every creative act is empowering, generating energy and self-worth. The role of a poet is “to help people live their lives,” Wallace Stevens said. This is why I read poetry. This is why I wanted to bring poems to inmates. Because poetry makes visible what cannot be seen. Because poetry takes familiar, everyday occurrences and reveals them to be extraordinary. As M.S. Merwin says, “Poetry addresses individuals in their most intimate, private, frightened and elated moments … because it comes closer than any other art form to addressing what cannot be said.”³

But I did not say this to the committee in the prison. I had not been asked to give a lecture. Instead, I read poems I would hand out and explained exercises I would give. I hoped the poems would speak for themselves. I was in luck. The head of the programming committee was looking for new programs for inmates and I was given permission to volunteer.

After the presentation, a security-risk officer showed me around the prison. He said he saw all prisoners as bad and dangerous. Otherwise, why would they be here? he asked.

I listened. I didn’t disagree. I wanted to give the workshops.

They are manipulative, he continued. They’ll try to get you to do things for them. I know that people like you think prisoners are poor, misunderstood people, but I know better, and you’ll see soon enough.

I was told that in March, after I would have already begun the workshops, I would have to go to the prison for a three-hour orientation given by this man. How would I sit through it? But I nodded. I thanked him.

I learned the word “remand” means waiting in jail for a trial, without being convicted of a crime. Later I found out that in Canadian jails, those on remand outnumber inmates who are sentenced. In 2014 there were approximately 13,650 adults held in remand, awaiting trial or sentencing, and 10,364 adults in sentenced-custody in the provinces and territories.⁴

Before I left, the security-risk officer talked to me about riots in the prison. He showed a display of weapons prisoners had made or that were smuggled into the prison, and noted the orifices of the body in which they were smuggled.

On the way home I stopped at a store and bought and ate an entire large chocolate bar, something I don’t often do. I felt so worn down. Weeks after that, when I gave the workshops, I did not feel enervated as I did in that orientation meeting. Often I was sad when each session was over, but I left with a sense of hope and possibility.

Each week, when I walked down those windowless halls, the iron doors clanging behind me, I felt again and again that the pain and longing in that crowded building created a spiritual intensity that made this a holy place, a dwelling whose inhabitants must be appreciated and treated with care. I had the privilege of hearing many of their stories. I wanted to honour them for their trust.

CHAPTER TWO

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 27, 2014

I am told I will be working with men on the North Wing. I’ve signed in, locked my coat and purse in the locker, put on the bullet-proof vest they’ve given me. As the guard leads me down one hall and up another, our stride punctuated by stopping and waiting to be buzzed through several locked doors, I try to memorize where I am going. I do not have a good sense of direction.

The workshop is held in a concrete room painted off-white. There are no windows, no other colour except the red fire extinguisher and the clock on the wall with its red numerals. The triangular desks are arranged in a semicircle. The chairs are heavy so prisoners cannot use them as weapons. At first I think they are filled with concrete, but later learn they are packed with sand.

Knowing the door will lock behind the guard, l ask, just before he leaves to get the participants, what happens in case of fire. He points out that the room is concrete; nothing can burn. The workshops too, I will soon understand, will be more a meeting place of tears than fire. And yet, as soon as the inmates come into the room, something ignites in me. I am very glad to be here.

Seven inmates wearing orange jumpsuits file in to the room when the guard opens the door. Each takes a seat in the semicircle. Hi, I’m Carole Langille, I say introducing myself. I tell them I am from New York City and feel very lucky that Nova Scotia is now my home. I tell them I teach in the Creative Writing Program at Dalhousie University. I am not a professor, I’m a lecturer and only teach one course, but I want them to know that I bring the same material to these workshops that I bring to my classes at the university.

I ask the men to introduce themselves as well and they each share their first name and where they are from. Marvin, a pale man with freckles, speaks very fast and I have to ask him to slow down so I can understand him. Jonah asks if I can come on Wednesdays instead of Thursdays so he will not have to miss gym and I tell him I can do that. He is a young compact man with a chiselled face and a short afro (when I describe this later to a friend of my son, I am told it is a short top with fade), and is so handsome he could be a model. There does not seem to be tension between the white, Indigenous, and Black men in the room.

I hand out the poem “How I Go to the Woods” by Mary Oliver.⁵ The poem ends by saying if the poet has ever invited you to go into the woods with her, she must love you very much. For their first assignment, which is due next week, I ask them to write, in detail, a few paragraphs about a place that is or was special to them and to write about who took them to this place.

I also give out the poem “To My Room” by Robert Berold.⁶ We talk about how a location can feel alive. In the poem, Berold addresses his room. He writes, I’ve slept three thousand nights in your arms. He ends the poem with the lines,

The trees are coming into leaf today.

I tell you this slowly because you’ve never been outside.

When the men leave to go back to their cells, I hear Marvin say to the guard, It’s about time we had a good workshop! I especially like Marvin and Jonah, both enthusiastic about reading poems and writing.

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 5

Today is my second workshop in the prison. I wait at the front desk for the corrections officer or one of the guards to take me to the program room where the workshop will be held. Though I’ve been here before, I know I will not find the North Wing on my own.

There are six inmates in the workshop today. Marvin is not here. The others say he is in lockdown – he broke some rule. They have him hanging from the walls in chains, Kendrick says, and I gasp. They all laugh and I say, I am gullible – please don’t tell me things that aren’t true.

It doesn’t yet click that lockdown is solitary confinement. An inmate is placed behind a metal door and has no contact with anyone except for an occasional guard. I wonder how long prisoners are put in solitary. Kendrick may have joked that the punishment is medieval, but he has hit upon the right metaphor.

The men have brought in the assignment I gave at the first workshop – to write, in detail, about a place that was special to them. All six have written about being near water – the lake, the ocean, a river that brought them comfort. Jonah said the poem by Mary Oliver made him smile and reminded him of his favourite place, a lake near his house where he used to walk his dogs. In his essay he writes: I know the lake, and the lake knows me. He is very attentive and respectful when he talks to the other participants and to me.

Eric, a man in his twenties with light brown hair and no tattoos on his arms, which is surprising in this place, asks me what my favourite place is. I tell him I love going off the path when I walk in the woods. I am afraid a bear will be there or some crazed animal will dart out at me, though I know that is very unlikely. I say, My husband is not an alarmist and he explains there are no bears in the woods behind our house, but still, I worry.

Jonah says, My aunt is an – what did you say – alarmist. Someone walks past our house and she looks out the window and worries about who is passing by.

Ella, a student working in the prison, is the only non-prisoner with me in the workshop. She is a young woman studying for her social work degree. She says she will type up what the men write, deciphering their script and correcting misspellings, so that, after a month, we can have all the men’s pieces typed and photocopied and each man can have a booklet of the group’s work.

This does not happen. Ella is so helpful, but also very busy. When she walks me to the main desk she says, The guys are really open here. They don’t have to put on an act.

At the end of the workshop I pass a guard in the hall. He says, I can’t believe these guys like poetry.

The inmates are still in the hall, but when they are no longer there I say, They are interested in writing and sharing what they are thinking and feeling. I don’t ask them to write poems. I bring in poems that explore various topics. We discuss the theme of the poem and then I ask them to write a few paragraphs about their own experiences that relate to our discussion.

One corrections officer says, It’s probably better that I don’t come into the workshop, because I would not believe these guys are sincere. I’d inhibit them. It is honest of her to say this.

Something I remember vividly about the workshops on the North Wing happens when the men are going back to their cells. As they are filing out I shake their hands and thank them for participating. Thank you, they say, thank you for coming here.

It takes a while to discover that the stories I hear in these workshops are a fire that focuses light on what is not easily seen. Their stories will linger in me, as burning embers.

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 12

We talk about metaphor and simile. She stood on her own dark shadow as if it were a bridge she was afraid to cross is a line from Jason Heroux’s poem “Flower Shop” that I give out.⁷ We talk about why comparing one image to another dramatizes both images and makes each more visual. I talk about how many metaphorical bridges in this life we’re all afraid to cross.

Then I give out the poem “My Father’s Love Letters” by Yusef Komunyakaa.⁸ The men understand details I did not comprehend when I first read the poem. I ask what the following lines mean:

The gleam of a five-pound wedge
On the concrete floor
Pulled a sunset
Through the doorway of his toolshed…

Antonio says, The wood is wedged in the door, leaving it open, and the people in the toolshed can see the sun set through this space.

It’s the verb that makes that line come alive, I say. Pulled in the sunset! When you write your stories think carefully about verbs, I tell the men.

Edward spends his time drawing instead of writing. He explains that he does not know how to read but “My Father’s Love Letters” inspired him, since the man in that poem couldn’t read either, but was still smart. Eric, Jonah, Antonio, and Kendrick all admire Ed’s drawings of people, houses, animals, buildings. They are beautiful, I agree.

I explain that the poem works because it is so specific and detailed:

We sat in the quiet brutality
Of voltage meters & pipe threaders,
Lost between sentences …

Why brutality of voltage meters and pipe threaders? I ask. Jonah says maybe the conversation between father and son has some brutality in it. The voltage meters are metal, he says, and metal can be sharp and jagged and so, sort of brutal.

The poem ends,

This man
Who stole roses & hyacinth
For his yard, would stand there
With eyes closed & fists balled,
Laboring over a simple word, almost
Redeemed by what he tried to say.

Kendrick asks what hyacinths look like. I try to describe a hyacinth. I say it’s a bulb, like a tulip, but its blossom has lots of little flowers growing together. This is not a good description. I tell them I will bring in a photo.

I ask how they feel about writing about someone who did something wrong. It can be a fictional character.

I did something wrong. That’s why I’m here, Eric says. I did plenty wrong.

I ask ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Contents
• Prologue
• Chapter One
• Chapter Two
• Chapter Three
• Chapter Four
• Chapter Five
• Chapter Six
• Chapter Seven
• Chapter Eight
• Chapter Nine
• Chapter Ten
• Chapter Eleven
• Chapter Twelve
• Chapter Thirteen
• Chapter Fourteen
• Poems
• Acknowledgements
• Endnotes
• Back Cover